WEMBURY.
Save, indeed, for the hullabaloo created by the battleships out to sea and the forts off Plymouth, practising their heavy guns, Wembury would scarce be associated with bloody war; yet if this place is really the “Wicganbeorch” of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—as by antiquaries it is supposed to be—it saw particularly hard fighting in A.D. 851, when “Ceorl the Ealdorman, with the men of Devon fought against the heathen men (that is, the Danes), and there made great slaughter and got the victory.”
Those “heathen” men or Danes were the vikings, of whom early history has so much to tell; but here we see the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, in writing “Wicganbeorch,” which means Wiking-bury—adopting the advice given so many centuries later by Tony Weller to his dutiful Sam, and “spelling it with a ‘we.’”
The big gun practice of the battleships out in the Channel, whose roaring is like that of several thunderstorms growling in concert across the water, is very impressive, and majestic, and altogether different from the sound of firing from the forts, producing a less resonant noise, like that of rude and impudent persons, very much out of temper, violently and continually slamming doors.
Oh! it is good to stand on the beach of a primitive place like Wembury when the sea breeze blows in strong, and the great curling waves come creaming up to the very walls of the mill-house, with the stinging salt particles on your face and an unutterable sense of vitality and freedom clothing you, and the giant waves spouting out yonder on the Mewstone, and the hoarse jamboree of the great guns bellowing yonder. But when the sea and the air are still and the August sun glares down upon the hilly coast, why then there is nothing for it but to either rest till sundown or plod on exhaustedly in a reeking moist heat, welcoming every little puff of wind on the rises, and almost sinking to the ground in the stew-pan of the hollows.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE CATWATER—THE BARBICAN—THE “PILGRIM FATHERS”—THE HOE
Distances in and around Plymouth are most remarkably deceptive, and the local geography is full of surprises. The famous Plymouth Sound is from two to four miles wide, but the clear air and the heights on either side give an impression of smaller scale. As you round the hilly coast from Wembury and come within the Sound, you enter upon a panoramic scene, where the great Breakwater, itself nearly a mile and a half long, with a sea-passage on the hither side of a mile’s breadth, rests upon the blue waters like some pigmy undertaking, and the ironclads seem quite trivial. The ordinary vision is altogether at fault at Plymouth, and requires careful adjustment to an unfamiliar scale of things; and in the meanwhile the stranger, walking round the coast, discovers that in tramping these last miles the way is quite twice as long as it seems. Plymouth town lies distinctly in sight, but you seem for a long while never to approach any nearer, and meanwhile you tramp up coastguard paths and down, and round into coves and still more round headlands, gradually coming within the area of War Department activities; where old forts and middle-aged forts, and forts still in the making astonish the rabbits. The outstanding features of garrison towns are grittiness, barrenness, and glare, served up in squalor; and military strength is generally made to look silly by clothes-lines fluttering signals of washing day over the embrasures and the dry moats. Approaching Plymouth therefore by Bovisand and Staddon Forts, the heat and the glare make the very brains ferment in your head, the grit scarifies your feet, and the sordid garrison details, and then the slumminess of Turnchapel sear your very soul. But in between, there are some jewelled nooks: the green valley and woods of Bovisand and little unexpected baylets, with tiny sands that you look down upon suddenly, shamefacedly surprising young ladies bathing in a costume of little more than nothing, supplemented thinly by their native modesty, and piquantly surmounted with picture-hats. Convention would require them to be embarrassed, but the startled pedestrian’s blushes and the nymphs’ comparative unconcern outrange the expected feelings of the situation.